


Rude Migratory

by aqhrodites



Category: X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-ish, Character Study, I suppose, Male-Female Friendship, warren/ororo friendship, who doesn't love him, with the rich boy angel because why not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-07 20:59:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11067033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aqhrodites/pseuds/aqhrodites
Summary: Warren once caught sight of the customary parchment sticking out from an opened bottom drawer of his instructor's desk. Three sentences were written in a semi-straight line in pencil.The first line was a name and phone number. The second, a location. The third, a list of products: hydrogen peroxide, bleach, rubber gloves, vinegar, morphine. An ominous chill of foreboding ricocheted like lightning down the notches of his spine and his covert feathers ruffle. But he tried to tell himself that it's innocent. A grocery list, maybe. The thought didn't quite settle. Fit badly. Uncomfortably.Wrong.Warren is a lot of things: mutant, stigmatized, drunkard.An anti-mutant crowd march through the streets one autumn night, wielding torches and picketed posters and chanting. Trashcans overturn. Car windows smashed. Atop a rooftop, Warren takes a swig of alcohol. He aims, drops it overhead the mob. He hears screams.Warren Worthington III is a lot of things. Being ashamed isn't one of them.





	Rude Migratory

**Author's Note:**

> **This is set partially before and partially after X-Men Apocalypse. Kind of a character study too about the movie version's Warren, so feel free to critic. Also Ororo guest stars. This is posted on my tumblr too.**

* * *

 

On his fifth birthday Warren receives one of those kiddie electric cars, a German Shepard puppy he names Roscoe, and a three thousand dollars worth of stocks. His favorite flavor of cake is marble. The servants preorder one coated in vanilla frosting and pink and blue candles that melt onto the white top. He whines and throws a tantrum that the color pink is for girls. The servants have thick accents of Dutch or Russian origin—he can't remember which, and honestly doesn't care to. They're chastised, ordered to remove the two pink candles and sing "happy birthday!" with forced smiles. Vaguely, he recalls one of them had a son in the military.

Warren Worthington the Third is azure-eyed and has pudgy, squishable cheeks. He has dimples from his mother and a baby blue iron-pressed shirt buttoned up to his chin, knee-length kid shorts, and polished dress shoes he'll be chastised until learning to not play outside while wearing. He learns to not impulsively run outside to play that following year.

On the morning of his seventh birthday, Warren is given a game console, a skateboard, and two thousand dollars. His stocks rise a quarter more. This time he gets a party involving his four closest friends and asks to try one of his Mommy's long sticks she smokes. Instead, he's scolded. This year, the cake is chocolate. There are no pink candles. 

He attends private prepatory school and receives a thirty dollar weekly allowance from doing nothing, the money spent in the candy shop around the corner from school. He's the envy of all his friends because he has the money and the charm and the confidence already inflated twice his stature.

On the morning of his eleventh birthday, Warren is taken to the doctor. There has been a rash spread across his back, one of the maids report to his parents. His doctor writes it off as dry skin, and proscribes a white cream that smells like grease because his mother is impatient and Warren has a ceremony that night and she would _be damned_ if he wrinkled his clothes from scratching, flecks of dry skin breaking off and snow-flaking his clothes. The doctor is skeptical but everyone is content.

His parents are traditionalists; he's had this ceremony set since birth.

At age twelve, boys begin going through puberty, his father explains. Their voices deepen, there's armpit hair and growth spurts and muscles and musk among _other things_. And Warren knows what it is already—he's seen the teen movies and pictures inside the books in the study and is very knowledgable that puberty causes girls and boys to develop _crushes_ and is why everyone wants a pool party and why girls start liking shopping so much—

His father laughs.

On the morning of his twelfth birthday, Warren receives a double layered marble cake and an appointment for surgery for suspicious lumps protruding from his back.

His parents are creationists; they call blasphemy about the doctor's diagnosis, and his explanation of how genes and chromosomes work and evolution. Simultaneously, his parents declare "if it happens, then God has willed it into existence." Meanwhile, down talking the doctor because their son had been tearing off feathers and shredding his skin with a pair of shears.

* * *

The removal surgeries are not successful.

But Roscoe is no longer whimpering at his side as the boy cries. Blood no longer spatters the bathroom floors. Instead, Warren wears jackets and heavy shirts to school. His growing wings are tied down underneath his clothes. He's instructed to keep his mouth shut and his actions cautious.

Roscoe remains at his side whether the boy is well or not.

Instead, Warren continues school a freak, the disappointing Worthington's only son.

* * *

His wings grow a foot past his outstretched fingertips, as does the deepening curve of his scowl with anything having to do remotely with his family. Or money. Or their reputation that he's predicted to ruin.

His life had been precisely set up to be an apprentice by now under his father to take over the family business. Instead, his father hesitates.

* * *

Not everyone _has_ a mutation, of course, he learns years later. Sometimes they're invisible. And sometimes they don't appear yet. And still, sometimes they'd never be able to be hidden at all. Similarly, not everyone finds their mutation useful or _favorable_ —even with the help of the family medics, as expensive and exclusive as they are.

Taken out of school for days at a time, Warren's attendance record is spotty. Because the thing— _mutations_ —these errors are simple oddities, not science, and it's an imperfections that can be cut off, shaved, reformed the way you want it to be.

By age fifteen, Warren has five distinct scars—one behind each shoulder blade—deeply set, healed scar tissue earned where the surgery failed. Earned because his parents began losing hope and the deep fissures formed around their mouths from disappointment and then guilt and then shame. And _shame_ within the Worthington family line—

Before the end of the school year, a homeschooling teacher is hired and another surgery appointment is scheduled. Though the young man hates the scalpels and sharp instruments and the mere _thought_ of them tearing open his skin, his blood pouring out, and then the reorganizing, replacing, rearranging of his insides... But his parents hate mutations even more. And nothing that he's seen can match the hate they spew late at night when they believe he's asleep; hushed talk behind the heavy cherrywood doors to the rarely-used first-floor drawing room, swirling a glass of bourbon and their throats tighten, their words choke, and suddenly Warren doesn't need to pee or go to the kitchen for water. Sometimes, absentmindedly, his hand would wonder to feel behind his shoulders, or he would flex the muscles of his back, or get an urge while looking outside an airplane window that urges him to jump, freefall the seventy feet in the air—as if it's a desire. As if it's a need. As if he's starting to _like_ it. Because it's one thing to have something you love, and another to shove it aside because of duties, to sign names on papers that promise everything is "for the best."

And thus, he keeps his secrets hidden from the press and public, and keeps his desires to touch the clouds to himself. He keeps everyone around him clueless, really, insubstantial and inarguably subjective, with no accompanying that the slip-ups of his words would ever be interpreted correctly.

Still—

Warren finishes his first year of high school in a private homeschool overseas. The only request he had when leaving was to have Roscoe come along. His parents tell him to remember to eat and follow his instructors and they promise it write. He doesn't believe them.

Warren's new classmates are furniture and teapots. His instructor a sixty year old with a thick European accent and three failed marriages and an estranged grandchild. The teen is taught literature, science, politics, math, zoology, French, German, and subtle mutant propaganda. He's placed on schedules for therapy and doctor's checkup every other week. His instructor gives a barely noticeable, barely audible upturn of his upper lip when Warren returns and as his wings grow larger every day. But the boy acts aloof, that he's truly a part of the gander and the luxury and the allure of his family's title—but he's so very _aware._ Aware of his shirt collar, stiff with starch as it scratches at the underside of his jaw; aware of his hands, white-knuckled and visibly trembling under the glares earned around the narrow, oddly cramped interior; aware of his shoulders, tense and jittery as a telltale shiver of excitement slowly manifests when a frisbee flies out of reach or a jet plane soaring overhead. He's aware that he was placed in a purposely small building, taking the analogy of a caged bird.

The only furniture in the "classroom" is an enormous ebony table, surface sleek, no engravement, and a single abalone paperweight sitting on the end closest to the door. Heavy damask curtains cover the tall windows. The air is fragrant with the scent of mint leaves, tobacco, and chamomile tea, and _expectation_. Anticipation. Revulsion.

* * *

It's there that he catches sight of the customary parchment left behind, sticking out from an opened bottom drawer of his instructor's desk.

He holds his breath. Reaches out. Pauses, swallows, touches—

Three sentences have been written in a semi-straight line across the page in pencil.

The first is a name and phone number. The second is a location, some street that is nearly not he opposite side of town. The third is a list of products—hydrogen peroxide, bleach, rubber gloves, cotton balls, vinegar, morphine. Warren studies the script, an ominous chill of foreboding ricocheting like lightning down the notches of his spine and his covert feathers ruffle. But he tries to tell himself that it's innocent. Normal. A grocery list, maybe. A discombobulated collection of items for the maid or the instructor's wife he sends child support to. The thought doesn't quite settle, though. Fits badly. Uncomfortably. _Wrong_.

He shakes his head, gaze shifting to the next papers on top.

It's an opened bank envelopes and failed tests and letters written from Warren's parents. Love letters from a woman named Maria. Another from Gracia. A folded newspaper. A torn edge of the wrapper from a candy bar. The contents inside the drawer are monochrome; it's difficult to parse out the finer details from the clutter and disorganization. Regardless, there's something charming—something _warm_ —about the scene he finds. It's an echo of loud, feminine laughter, dried ink smudges, and raucous voices over the telephone. It's _charming_ because for the first time, he realizes that his instructor has a life, loved ones, and interactions outside the confines of this small home school. Warren traces the lettering of somewhat chaotic pen lines, a response to a letter of Gracia's, a curious pang of _longing_ reverberating through the meat of his chest. He wastes a moment marveling at that. Nostalgia for a memory that isn't his.

He snorts, shaking his head again, and moves on to the next page in the pile.

It's a notecard. Or, well, the remains of one, he thinks. A crumpled, charred piece of paper whose typography is faded and barely legible. A vague sort of apprehension prickles his scalp. This notecard holds similar orders as the list found earlier. However, this one seemed to be written directly from the source, as the sender is the same name of that in the list found. From what Warren can make out, there's something about a debt and stocks and bird feathers. The hairs raise on the back of his neck. And he feels very much like a caged bird once more.

But then he remembers that birds, not the ones found in homes and sold over counters, but of the ones too wild and untamable. Brave and brash and vulgar, but not necessarily honorable. Regal creatures— _beautiful_ , yes, but also deadly. Dangerous. Hunters. Fierce. Ferocious. Certain of their place in the natural order.

Warren smiles, finally.

* * *

On the morning of his seventeenth birthday, Warren lets himself out of school and requests a discharge from his academia for a doctor's appointment. Then he requests that nervous breakdown be the excuse on his note. The doctor states that's not good enough, considering the teen's parents, even if he wanted to. Warren tells that he is concerned for his safety. He's given a therapy session instead.

* * *

His parents stop writing after the first four months. Well, their letters were only occasionally, anyway.

* * *

The next in line to a million-dollar company, Warren Worthington drops out of school at eighteen.

* * *

Once or twice he's donned a blonde wig and a long nightshirt, holes cut in the back, and flew over the city late in the night. _Perhaps_ , on a few occasions, he's witnessed a robbery or a bus crash and have swooped in. "An actual angel," the newspaper assumes, and he's had to lie when his parents suddenly call out of the blue. Despite these things, Warren isn't an angel. He considers himself far from it, and it all had been for the selfish reason to stretch his feathers, and— _those people were just in the way! Being stupid is all._

Because the thing about Warren is—

 _The thing about Warren is_ —

There's three, actually: pompous, pertinacious, proud. Sometimes one more than the other. Most times it's altogether. He's azure eyes and unkempt blonde curls and a bad attitude, instigating bar fights, and difficulty expresssing deep sentiment. He's shame and assertiveness. He's the billionaire's disowned son. The permanent smudge on his tarnished family reputation; the burned out portrait on the family tree.

Warren is a lot of things.

Mutant.

Stigmatized.

Drunkard.

An anti-mutant crowd march through the streets one autumn night, wielding torches and picketed posters and chanting. We witnesses a parent grabbed by the shoulders, their child ripped from their arms. Trashcans overturned. Car windows smashed. Atop a rooftop, Warren takes a swig of the alcohol he's been nursing. He aims, drops it overhead the mob. He hears screams; his eyesight blurs.

Warren Worthington is a lot of things.

Being ashamed isn't one of them.

* * *

At age eighteen, he meets a man in East Berlin who is obscured by cigar smoke. Thick, burly bodyguards loiter around the small room. The man offers Warren work. And under a fake name, the mutant signs a contract for shelter for himself, an empty shed with a loft, and a "grueling" job to make payments for Warren's new employer. The man smiles, and all Warren can see is gold; almost none of his teeth are real.

* * *

Warren is thrusted into a cage. He must fight to the death, he's told, lest both he and his fighting opponent are put to death. He's seen it once, a bull-like man and shy woman who refused to fight were bound by their wrists and ankles. A bright light lit up the building, and there were screams, and then silence and a putrid, burned smell. And so, when he's told to fight, he does.

The billionaire's son turned fighter. A killer. A hunter. A predatory.

By age twenty-two, he's donned the stage name Angel, emerging in a customized studded leather jacket and sharpened talons. And for once, the name is fitting. Angels are feared and mighty. He scratches into the floor tick marks of his winning.

Warren becomes a caged bird in every sense of the way.

_"The Winged Warrior. The Bird of Prey. The Angel of Death. ANGEL!"_

And the crowds adore him. They cheer louder with every body he knocks, dead. Of the darker his snow white wings become, drenched in the blood of innocents. They love it, and he shouts along with the cheers, feeling the adrenaline, feeling the relief of surviving through another day.

But the announcer continues: _"From the Munich Circus; ladies and gentleman, the only one that could take on an angel is the Devil himself. I give you the amazing, the fantastic, NIGHTCRAWLER!"_

For a second, Warren freezes, his blood turns cold from the utter _fear_ in the other mutant's features who couldn't be older than when he abandoned his family name. He watches the mutant attempt and fail to teleport out of the cage. But with a threatening motion by the bodyguards in the back of the crowd, The Bird of Prey takes a swing at his fighting opponent.

* * *

Apocalypse is here.

And Warren—he can still taste the remnants of his breakfast: half a bottle of beer, hardboiled eggs and blood sausage. And he he can still remember Nightcrawler flinging him around the electrically-lined cage, the copper-red sheen of blood that stained his arm, Nightcrawler's blue sulfuric smoke and hair and the lion-gold of his demonic eyes and the faint roar of a suddenly panicked crowd as they stampede out of the building. And now, as he stumbles down from the rafters to land, stumble face-to-face with this some blue presumed _big-shot_ who seems to have been too passionate about body paint and tattoos, shards of a broken alcohol bottle at his feet, Warren can still _hear_ the screams as the electric wires that had gone awry around the caged area.

Before him, Apocalypse's wingwomen attempt to persuade Warren that he could become _better and powerful_.

Warren had formed unbidden and so very _unwanted_ an answer, at last, to the armored face of this skeptical man.

He used to wonder why people tend to follow someone whom they suspect could make them prosper, to spend all their time and life savings in nothing but uncertain, hypothetical variables and word of mouth—it doesn't matter—he thinks as he tucks a hand in the back pocket of his pants and his toe tucks, trips, the bottle of vodka falling from his hand as a pain lacerating up the notches of his spine.

His new God speaks, and the world begins to splinter.

* * *

There is a war of some sorts.

It involves Warren's new God and a group of mutants.

Some are very committed, very combative. There's Betsy, Magnets, and Ororo who seems to only be following orders and holding onto a hope to be something better, _someone_ better, and that this blue weirdo will achieve it—and it's definitely plausible with what he's seen, but—

Warren couldn't care less.

* * *

He's declared dead around 4:37 in the afternoon.

Or, that's what he's told after waking up in a makeshift hospital room in a mansion somewhere in Winchester, New York.

It was a plane crash, a girl with red head explains at the foot of his hospital bed. She's telepathic. She's tact, and _alluring_.

She's also telekinetic, she explains, tightening the binds on his wrist and ankles, telling that she is grateful for the offer but he isn't her type.

* * *

Warren Worthington has been equal parts frustrating and infuriating for about as long as Ororo Munroe has known him.

It isn't hypothetical; he's sanctimonious, and he's condescending, and he's obstinate. _Obnoxious_. He sneers when she tries one of her old "ridiculous fucking puns," and he snorts out a laugh that's _just_ shy of too mean when it's revealed that she'd _blinks back tears_ too goddamn much at wedding photos. He cuts her off when she talks. Ignores her when she's quiet. Mocks her when she's shown up hungover for Saturday brunch, and when she flirts with the bartender at a gross little dive bar in America, and when she finally slips her a crudely torn corner of paper that Warren would dissolve in her drink before grabbing her above her elbow to drag her home.

It's a year after the fall of Apocalypse, after the fall of their God, and Ororo can't tell if it was a good thing that he was picked up, limping, one wing broken, and with second degree burns from the jet-plane crash he nearly died in. Ororo passes him and her answer is an ambiguous mixture, a clash of brotherhood and accustomed and anomalous.

His disdain—icy-hot and obvious and so, so unforgivingly _sharp_ —had bothered her, once upon a time.

It doesn't anymore.

* * *

The sun is out, and the pool water is glittering.

"Are you seriously drinking at four in the afternoon?" Ororo asks. Her mohawk hair is thick and wavy from moisturizer and the summer heat. "On a _Tuesday?_ "

"Mhm," Warren hums, taking another swallow, irritation spiking. "It's not afternoon. It's lunchtime. And I like to pair my meals with the appropriate drinks." Talks another sip. "Because I have _taste_. Unlike most of the _heathens_ here."

"Taste to be shit-faced by five?"

And he reminds her that he can hold his liquor; that he's some renown drinking champion at some bar back in Germany.

"You realize you aren't _actually_ still living back in your allegedly _billion-dollar home_ , right?" She flashes him a smile that a photographer had once called 'terrifying'. "McCoy is going to break your ankles if he catches your feet on the table."

"McCoy? Who's McCoy?" So Ororo reminds him that it's the mutant nicknames Beast. "You think I'm afraid of some walking hairball? Get out." Warren leans back in the lawn chair, sliding his sunglasses down his forehead.

"No, I think you shouldn't disrespect those who bring you into their home and bring you back from _an inch from death_. Especially when they're not trying to harm you."

Warren's remark is that saving him had never been requested. Adjusts in his seat, closes his eyes.

Beside him, Ororo rolls her wrist and the sky becomes overcast. Finally gaining his attention, Warren cracks open an eye and his nostrils are flaring, his glaring sharp even behind the tinted lenses of his glasses.

"I did. I requested it, you spoiled, arrogant, bug-brain. They were ready to let you die out there and not even go check. And Betsy—Betsy _left_ , in case you forgot." She rests her hands on her hips; her white sundress matched her sunhat and sandals. He thinks she looks like someone from those fucking _chick flicks_. "If you'd put that bottle down and try to interact with others, than maybe you would have found that out."

He's silent. The inland pool water sloshes. The sound of children acres away reach them. Warren glances off to the side. Sneers. "Don't try to act like you're my fucking _mother_ —"

"Why would I want to be your mother?!"

The sunglasses are pushed down his nose, giving her a skeptical glance. "Because you're starting to look the part."

"I look good, what are you talking about? Horsemen forever, you _stupid_ idiot," she informs him, the sweetness of her tone drenched in sarcasm.

He pauses. "Yeah, well—"

"Yeah well nothing. Or did you _forget_ that too?"

The water sloshes onto the heated white concrete. There's a child asleep on a floating pool mat. Insects sound on the wind, off near the trees. Condensation trickles down the outer side of Warren's drink, the glass suddenly freezing cold and burning his palm. And he knows that Ororo is staring, staring, staring, waiting for some type of approval—and sometimes her sky blue eyes can petrify more than appropriately necessary and terrify when they glaze over cotton-white and reminds him not to push her far; the humidity prickles his scalp, sticks the waistband of his shorts to his skin, and she's staring, she's staring, and he knows that she isn't going to leave unless fucking otherwise, and she's staring and _staring_ —

Warren snorts.

The alcohol swirls in his glass. He takes a drink.

* * *

"Monroe," Warren barks, kicking Ororo's bedroom door open. There's the telltale glimmer of wine creeping into his voice. Again. "What's the typical stance about a plus-one? Why does everyone like plus-ones? I don't _do_ plus-ones. You _know_ that."

Ororo doesn't pull her nose from the pages of the novel she's reading. "What's this about this time?"

Warren yanks at the stretched sleeve of his shirt and rolls his neck around. "It's a—a wedding," he lies. "A get together—of some sort..."

Ororo wrinkles her nose. "So?"

"That means _people_. _Impressionably important_ people," Warren clarifies. "As in—of people who could pay, like, twice as much for this place. Or even that ugly ass Porsche you were eyeballing last weekend."

Ororo clenches her jaw. " _So?_ " she repeats, more dangerously.

" _So,_ " Warren drawls, drumming his fingers along the side of his pants, "it will be _beneficial_ for people to not _speculate_ about who, exactly, you're _dating_. Or why you're not, and therefore not worthy."

She stops, the gears turning in her head, the connection fusing. "I don't date."

"Too bad."

"You _know_ I don't date," Ororo continues, as if Warren hasn't spoken.

Warren offers a tight smile. "Intimately."

"Not all of us try to ask out people when they're half-drunk. Or not even interested. Why don't you go steal somebody else's girlfriend?"

Warren huffs. "She was a _pledge_ , and he wasn't even her _boyfriend_."

"Fiancé, then?"

"She wasn't my _girlfriend_ and it wasn't a fucking _proposal_ ," he rolls his eyes, stating what he had been told by the girl back then, but the denial comes out flimsy.

"Whatever. I don't what to know any more than I do. But whatever this _plus-one_ situation means, I—"

"It means _you_ can be my plus-one. And I'll throw in a real diamond necklace if you agree," Warren finishes, looking smug.

Finally, the book lowers. "Don't tell me you're afraid of some rich people? _You're_ rich! Or at least your family is."

He scoffs. "I'm not _afraid_ of anyone. Look, I just need—"

"Then who are they, Warren? Why are they so important? Why do you even _care_?"

Suddenly, he's silent and his confident outer layer vanishes, and Ororo could swear that his face takes on _the slightest_ hint of uneasiness.

"Some—" he starts, breaks off, starts over. "Some of them—the main people holding the party—are my parents," he grits. It's half-hearted. It's bitter.


End file.
